The School of Economics Seminar Series are held on a weekly basis from 12.00 noon to 1.15pm. Venues will be emailed weekly. All are welcome to attend and a light lunch is provided. Details below on upcoming seminars. If you would like further details of any of the seminars please contact our Seminar Coordinator Assoc Prof Abbas Valadkhani. Details of previous seminars are also available - please click here.
Spring Session Programme
Date & Speaker
Room
Topic
17 July 2008 Dr Khorshed Chowdhury School of Economics, UoW
Commerce Research Wing Meeting Room
40A G81
Balassa-Samuelson Effect Approaching Fifty Year - Is it Retiring Early in Australia?
This paper tests empirically the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) hypothesis using annual data for Australia. We applied the ARDL cointegration technique developed by Pesaran et al. (2001) and found evidence of a significant long-run relationship between real exchange rate and Australia-US productivity differential during the period of 1950-2003. We found that a one per cent increase in labour productivity in Australia relative to the US will lead to 5.6 per cent appreciation in the real exchange rate of Australia. We suspect that the elasticity coefficient is “over-estimated” due to the exclusion of relevant explanatory variables. The dynamics and the determinants of the real exchange rate movements are numerous; they include terms of trade, interest rate differentials, net foreign liabilities among others along with labour productivity differential.
24 July 2008 A/Prof Ann Hodgkinson & A/Prof Abbas Valadkhani School of Economics, UoW
67.302
Community valuations of environmental quality in coastal lakes: Lake Illawarra case study
This study illustrates how the hedonic pricing method can be used to help assess the benefits associated with environmental improvement expenditure in an urban setting. It provides a case study for Lake Illawarra in southern NSW, utilising relatively easily accessible secondary data, and a semi-logarithmic regression form. The HPM valuation assumes households will pay more for a property near a desirable environmental feature, holding all other determinants of price constant. The value achieved here was substantially greater than either expenditures to date or the actuarial valuation of the Lake. The study demonstrates the applicability of the technique and recommends its further development and use for this type of public decision-making, and so justifies further environmental improvements on this asset. A range of other data was also generated by the methodology that adds to the usefulness of this approach for general planning purposes.
Economic and Social Policy Lecture 2008
29 July 2008 (Tuesday) Ms Fernanda Borges President of the National Party, East Timor
35.G20
Coffee/Tea from 12:00
Lecture 12:30 - 2:00 pm
Please RSVP to rstutz@uow.edu.au
or 4221 3666
Economic and Political Challenges for East Timor
7 August 2008 Peter Siminski
School of Economics, UoW
19.1002
Title: What Would the Average Public Sector Employee be Paid in the Private Sector
This paper estimates the average Australian public sector wage premium. It includes a detailed critical review of the methods available to address this issue. The chosen approach is a quasi-differenced panel data model, estimated by the Generalised Method of Moments, which has many advantages over other methods and has not been used before for this topic. I find a positive average public sector wage premium for both sexes. The best estimates are 7.9% for men and 6.8% for women. The estimates are statistically significant for men (p = 0.006) and for women (p = 0.005). No evidence is found to suggest that the public sector has an equalising effect on the wages of its workers.
14 August 2008 Dr Paul Chen
ANU
25.128 *Please note room change
Title: Reciprocity at the Workplace: Do Fair Wages Lead to Higher Effort, Productivity, and Profitability?
Do workers reward fair wages with higher job effort, better labour relations, and greater workplace labour productivity and profitability (positive reciprocity) and punish unfair wages with lower effort, worse relations, and lesser productivity and profitability (negative reciprocity)? The importance of fairness and reciprocity in labour markets rests largely on experimental results examining the behaviour of subjects in laboratory settings. In contrast, I examine whether workers, who report whether they feel that their pay is fair or unfair, reciprocate in their normal, everyday jobs using a large, economy-wide, Australian linked survey of workers and workplaces. Without controls for pay schemes, no statistically significant evidence of positive reciprocity is found although I find some evidence of negative reciprocity in labour relations and workplace labour productivity. I introduce controls for pay scheme to isolate a particular payment arrangement which would best foster reciprocity. Under that particular scheme, however, no greater evidence of reciprocity is found relative to other pay schemes. Overall, the evidence consistent with either positive or negative worker reciprocity is not strong.
21 August 2008 Dr Arusha Cooray School of Economics, UoW
19.1002
Title: The Financial Sector as an Engine of Growth
Abstract: The Mankiw-Romer-Weil (1992) augmented Solow model is extended to incorporate the financial sector in this study. Distinguishing between financial capital, physical capital and human capital, the study attempts to identify in particular, the effects of financial capital on economic growth. The study is also examines the effects of financial sector efficiency on economic growth. The financial sector augmented model is tested on 36 emerging and developing economies. Strong support is found for the financial sector augmented model.
28 August 2008
No seminar held
4 September 2008 Professor Bill Griffiths University of Melbourne
19.1002
Title: Posterior Distributions for Welfare Changes in Agricultural Commodity Markets
Abstract: A formal Bayesian-based methodology is presented for evaluating the welfare effects of economic changes in agricultural commodity markets. The procedure is applied to an empirical example, demonstrating how posterior densities may be obtained for estimated welfare changes. These posterior densities provide an intuitive and rigorous method for illustrating the robustness of the results from an applied welfare analysis to the effects of parameter uncertainty. The procedure is used to explore the implications of stochastic error terms in supply and demand curves for the measurement of welfare changes.
11 September 2008 Dr Chris Ryan ANU
Commerce Research Wing Meeting Room
40A G81
Title: Measurement of Income Mobility in Australia
Abstract: While measurement error has the potential to bias upwards estimates of how mobile individuals are around the income distribution from one year to the next, in practice we find this effect in Australian data to be small. We use annual panel data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey and find evidence of substantial measurement error in reports of earnings. Measurement error appears to contribute about 20% of the variance in earnings. This is within the range of estimates found in international studies. However, the measurement error is `non-classical' in ways that reduce its impact when applied to income mobility measures, such as the proportion who remain `poor' from year to year. Hence, we find that mobility rates in observed data do not appear to be very different from those where we attempt to remove the impact of measurement error to estimate underlying mobility.
18 September 2008 Assoc Prof Amnon Levy School of Economics
19.1002
Title: Environment and Population without and with Environmental Concern and Control
Abstract: In the absence of concern and control, habitable environment and human population are possibly heading toward mutual extinction. The incorporation of a direct effect, through environmental concern, and indirect effect, through allocation of resources to rehabilitation, of the state of the environment on instantaneous utility into a Ramsey-type lifetime-utility maximization model imply that a minimal degree of impatience is necessary for an interior steady state to exist. This steady state is unique, approachable along a path with damped oscillations of consumption and rehabilitative investment, and characterized by a larger production than the steady state without environmental concern
25 September 2008 Assoc Prof Ed Wilson School of Economics
Commerce Research Wing Meeting Room
40A G81
Title: A Critique of Modelling and Estimating the Effects of Consistent Conditional Variance Expectations
Abstract: The random walk hypothesis has been extensively used to test for market efficiency, in terms of whether prices and expectations fully reflect all available information and risk. It has been applied to many types of markets including the trading of agricultural products and monetary instruments. Given the simplicity of the hypothesis it is surprising the random walk has been able to outperform more sophisticated forecasting models.
Central to its success has been the common practice of allowing for autocorrelated conditional variances to model the observed changing volatilities in markets. This has led to the development and wide use of econometric packages based on extensions of the ARCH model to test for, and estimate time varying conditional variances. This paper provides a simple critique of this methodology.
2 October 2008 No Seminar - Australian Conference of Economists
9 October 2008 Professor Paul Frijters QUT
Commerce Research Wing Meeting Room
40A G81
How much do the obese cost us?
16 October 2008 Professor Peter Saunders Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW
19.1002
23 October 2008 Dr Frank Neri School of Economics, UoW
19.1002
Autumn Session Programme
6 March 2008
Dr Bruce Bradbury, Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW
Commerce Research Wing Meeting Room
40A G81
Time and the Cost of Children This paper uses the 'adult goods' method to estimate the full costs of children. Full costs include both expenditure and time costs. Adult personal time (comprising pure leisure, sleep and other personal care) is used as the adult good. Previous research has shown that the presence of children in the household leads to a reduction in adult personal time. This paper develops a simple household economic model to show how this information can be used to develop an equivalence scale for adult consumption that takes account of both the expenditure and time costs of children. Preliminary estimates using Australian data suggest a very large cost – much higher than that typically assumed for expenditure costs. The full cost of children declines with age, despite the expenditure cost rising. The paper discusses the limitations of the adult good method and considers the broader welfare implications of these costs.
13 March 2008
Assoc Prof Charles Harvie
School of Economics, UoW
67.302
Vietnam’s Economic Reforms and Private Sector Development
20 March 2008
67.302
Postponed
27 March 2008
Assoc Prof Gary Tian
School of Accounting & Finance, UoW
40.124
Are Chinese stock markets becoming increasingly integrated with other markets in the greater China region and other major markets
3 April 2008
Prof Sara Dolnicar
School of Management & Marketing, UoW
67.302
Winning competitive grants Although every competitive grant is different, there are a few tips and tricks that can improve your success chances. At this seminar Sara will talk about her personal experiences in failing and succeeding to win ARC grants. Topics covered will include: which idea is suitable, pulling together the right team, polishing the grant, making the most of every page, winning them over on the first page and not letting them get you down if you don't succeed immediately.
10 April 2008
Assoc Prof Michael Shields
University of Melbourne
Commerce Research Wing Meeting Room
40A G81
Comparing Subjective and Objective Measures of Health: Evidence from Hypertension for the Income/Health Gradient
Abstract: Economists rely heavily on self-reported measures of health status to examine the relationship between income and health. In this paper we directly compare survey responses to a self-reported measure of health that is commonly available in nationally-representative individual and household surveys, with objective measures of the same health condition. Our particular focus is on hypertension, which is the most prevalent health condition in Western countries. Using data from the Health Survey for England, we find that there is a substantial difference in the percentage of adult survey respondents reporting that they have hypertension as a chronic health condition compared to that from repeated measurements by a trained nurse. Around 85% of individuals measured as having hypertension do not report having it as a chronic illness. Importantly, we find no evidence of an income/health gradient using self-reported hypertension, but a large (about 14 times the size) gradient when using objectively measured hypertension. We also find that the probability of false negative reporting, that is an individual not reporting to have chronic hypertension when in fact they have it, is significantly higher for individuals living in low income households. Given the wide use of such self-reported chronic health conditions in applied research, and the asymptomatic nature of many major illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and cancer at moderate and sometimes very elevated levels, we show that using commonly available self-reported chronic health measures is likely to lead to an underestimate of true income-related inequalities in health. This has important implications for policy advice.
17 April 2008
Prof Morris Altman, Saskatchewan
Commerce Research Wing Meeting Room
40A G81
Behavioral Economics for Smart People?Behavioral Economics, the Rationality Assumption, and Public Policy Abstract: Within the realm of behavioral economics an important methodological divide is emerging with significant public policy consequences. Following in the tradition of Kahneman and Tversky, the case is being made that individual decision making is fundamentally and persistently biased and error prone and therefore lacking in intelligence and rationality. The typical individual, who is physiologically wired in this manner, is incapable of making key utility maximizing decisions on their own behalf thus requiring decisions to be made on their behalf by some benevolent more intelligent individual or group of individuals (benevolent paternalism). This world view runs contrary to the basic methodological tenants of neoclassical economics and also of pioneering research in behavioral economics exemplified in the work of Simon and March. Simon and March argue that individual behavior is typically intelligent and rational even if it is inconsistent with the normative rules of neoclassical rationality.We argue, building upon this tradition and extending the early methodological work of Von Mises, that it is important to distinguish between rational, intelligent, purposeful behavior and errors in decision making. It is also important that the norms for correct behavior be based upon the imperfect cognitive wiring of decision makers and information imperfections (boundedrationality) as opposed the neoclassical norms. In this case, experimental evidence that purports to support the case for human irrationality is found wanting as is the case for benevolent paternalism and ‘altruistically inclined’ human agency and society. Individual and social welfare can be enhanced through learning, institutional reforms and through corrections for market failures as opposed to outside parties imposing their preferences on the general public (Hayek’s contributions are of importance here). Moreover, the experimental literature suggests that important facets of neoclassical theory require revision to take into account the actualities of human agency.
24 April 2008
Dr Gigi Foster
Uni of South Australia
67.302
Estimating Spillovers using Panel Data, with an Application to the Classroom Abstract: Obtaining consistent estimates of spillovers in an educational context is hampered by two issues: selection into peer groups and peer effects emanating from unobservable characteristics. We develop an algorithm for estimating spillovers using panel data that addresses both of these problems. The key innovation is to allow the spillover to operate through the fixed effects of a student's peers. The only data requirements are multiple outcomes per student and heterogeneity in the peer group over time. We firrst show that the non-linear least squares estimate of the spillover is consistent and asymptotically normal as N à infinity with T fixed. We then provide an iterative estimation algorithm that is easy to implement and that converges to the non-linear least squares solution. Using University of Maryland transcript data, we find statistically significant peer effects on course grades, particularly in courses of a collaborative nature. We compare our method with traditional approaches to the estimation of peer effects, and quantify separately the biases associated with selection and spillovers through peer unobservables.
1 May 2008
Assoc Prof Garry Barrett
UNSW
67.302
Consistent Nonparametric Tests for Lorenz Dominance
Abstract: Two consistent nonparametric tests for Lorenz dominance are presented. The tests are based on the difference between the empirical Lorenz curves for two independent samples of welfare related variables. The asymptotic properties of the test statistic are derived. Although the limiting distribution of the test statistics are nonstandard, we propose and justify bootstrap methods of inference. The performance of the two approaches is examined and compared in the context of a Monte Carlo study and an analysis of income and consumption inequality in Australia over 1980’s and 1990’s.
8 May 2008
Dr Andrew Tan School of Accounting & Finance, UoW
Commerce Research Wing Meeting Room
40A G81
TBA
15 May 2008
Kankesu Jayanthakumaran and Shao-Wei Lee, School of Economics, UoW
67.302
Income Convergence of the SAARC-5 countries
22 May 2008
Prof Simon Ville
School of Economics, UoW
67.302
TBA
29 May 2008
Heather Anderson, ANU
67.302
How to account for structural changes brought about by the introduction of the Euro
6 June 2008
Dr Guibin Zhang
School of Economics, UoW
Commerce Research Wing Meeting Room
40A G81
Models of Trust-Sharing in Chinese Private Enterprises
12 June 2008
Dr Boyd Hunter, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU
Commerce Research Wing Meeting Room
40A G81
Convergence and divergence in socioeconomic outcomes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians: How realistic are the prospects for ‘closing the gaps’? Abstract: 'Practical reconciliation’ and ‘closing the gaps’ has been put forward as a framework on which to base policies to address Indigenous disadvantage. This census-based analysis examines trends of Indigenous wellbeing since the 1967 referendum. There has been steady, although not spectacular improvement in basic socioeconomic outcomes in the last 35 years. This finding is somewhat at odds with the common perception of the ‘failure’ of Indigenous policy. Notwithstanding, the evidence for convergence between Indigenous and non-Indigenous outcomes is not always consistent. This paper presents some analysis of when the gaps might be closed, based on the best case scenarios, in order to assess the realism of such goals.
19 June 2008
Professor Clem Tisdell
School of Economics The University of Queensland
